Westfield, NJ (RestaurantNews.com) The Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers (CHART) is pleased to announce a new partnership with Unboxed Training & Technologya leader in award-winning learning experiences, custom training content, and AI-powered learning technology.
“Unboxed creates integrated, learner-focused solutions that scale across distributed workforces,” said CHART President Dr. Felicia White, Ed.D, Vice President of Learning & Leadership Development for Ascent Hospitality Management. “Their team’s expertise will help our members deliver relevant, actionable training that fits seamlessly into the daily workflow of today’s learners.”
“We are excited to continue forging deep partnerships within the hospitality industry. CHART provides us with collaborative opportunities to bring more value to our clients such as Hyatt, Hilton, Steak ‘n Shake, and Wingstop,” said Katy Foucar-Szocki, Senior Director, Client Strategy at Unboxed Training & Technology.
CHART (CHART.org), a non-profit professional association founded in 1970, is the leading resource for the development and advancement of hospitality training professionals and their organizations. With more than 500 members from more than 350 restaurant, foodservice, and lodging companies, CHART represents a workforce of almost three million. CHART includes all facets of hospitality training, learning, and performance professionals; from entry level to senior executive. CHART’s mission is to develop hospitality training professionals to improve performance through access to networks, education, and resources. Follow CHART on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at @CHARTtrainers.
About Unboxed Training & Technology
Unboxed Training & Technology specializes in helping organizations cultivate Skill Agility®—the ability to rapidly develop skills in response to business changes. Their comprehensive services, including consulting, strategy, and custom training solutions, empower leaders and employees to embrace continuous learning, adapting swiftly to meet business goals.
This is today’s edition of The Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
AI-generated images can teach robots how to act
Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories.
Now, researchers from Stephen James’s Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They’ve developed a new system, called Genima, that fine-tunes the image-generating AI model Stable Diffusion to draw robots’ movements, helping guide them both in simulations and in the real world.
Genima could make it easier to train different types of robots to complete tasks—machines ranging from mechanical arms to humanoid robots and driverless cars—as well as making AI web agents more useful. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
These 15 companies are innovating in climate tech
We’ve just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. This annual project is one the climate team at MIT Technology Review pours a lot of time and thought into, and we’re thrilled to finally share it with you.
Our goal is to spotlight businesses we believe could help make a dent in climate change. This year’s list includes companies from a wide range of industries, headquartered on five continents. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend giving it a look. Each company has a profile in which we’ve outlined why it made the list, what sort of impact the business might have, and what challenges it’s likely to face.
Casey Crownhart, our senior climate reporter, has dug into what these pioneering businesses reveal about the race to address climate change. Read about what she found out here.
This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 OpenAI has been valued at an eye watering $157 billion A new funding round has made it one of the most valuable startups of all time. (WP $) + The company has urged investors to avoid funding rival AI firms. (FT $) + The secret to OpenAI’s fundraising success? Its extremely capable CFO. (The Information $)
2 Chipmakers are keeping a close eye on two North Carolina mines Hurricane Helene has forced production to grind to a halt. (Bloomberg $) + The mines contain high purity quartz, which is essential to make chips. (Vox)
3 Hacking Meta’s smart glasses turns them into powerful doxxing tools Students equipped the device with real-time facial recognition software. (404 Media) + The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI. (MIT Technology Review)
4 American chips are powering Russian missiles The deadly weapons are killing Ukrainian civilians, including a six-year old girl. (Bloomberg $)
5 Character.ai is pivoting away from making AI models Ultimately, training LLMs proved to be too expensive. (FT $) + Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Apple is punishing social apps They’re no longer allowed to access a user’s contact list. (NYT $) + Threads is letting users connect with other social networks for the first time. (WP $)
7 Flying cars are hovering in a gray legal area Today’s EVOTLs are technically breaking the law, and it’s hard to see that changing. (NY Mag $) + These aircraft could change how we fly. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Workplace AI tools can’t always be trusted Make sure you’re aware of when it’s still writing a transcript, for one. (WP $) + You should think twice about sharing personal info with chatbots, too. (The Atlantic $)
9 How to boost the benefits of meditation Stimulating the brain could help to unlock the mysteries of the mind. (Vox) + Here’s how personalized brain stimulation could treat depression. (MIT Technology Review)
10 This video game birthed a generation of historians 📜 Age of Empires is a classic that defined a genre. (The Guardian)
Quote of the day
“We have some stock in Nvidia, and that’s who’s going to get all of this money anyway.”
—A venture capitalist who didn’t participate in OpenAI’s massive funding round explains why they don’t have FOMO to Axios’ business editor Dan Primack.
The big story
This town’s mining battle reveals the contentious path to a cleaner future
January 2024
In June last year, Talon, an exploratory mining company, submitted a proposal to Minnesota state regulators to begin digging up as much as 725,000 metric tons of raw ore per year, mainly to unlock the rich and lucrative reserves of high-grade nickel in the bedrock.
Talon is striving to distance itself from the mining industry’s dirty past, portraying its plan as a clean, friendly model of modern mineral extraction. It proclaims the site will help to power a greener future for the US by producing the nickel needed to manufacture batteries for electric cars and trucks, but with low emissions and light environmental impacts.
But as the company has quickly discovered, a lot of locals aren’t eager for major mining operations near their towns. Read the full story.
—James Temple
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Watch out, Nibi the adorable beaver’s about! 🦫 (Thanks Alice!) + If you’ve never seen one man sing both sides of Phantom of the Opera before, now you have. + TV doesn’t come much more unhinged than Love Is Blind (if you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat). + How to catch a glimpse of the Comet A3, also known as Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.
What’s new: It’s tricky to get robots to do things in environments they’ve never seen before. Typically, researchers need to train them on new data for every new place they encounter, which can become very time-consuming and expensive. Now, researchers have developed a series of AI models that teach robots to complete basic tasks in new surroundings without further training or fine-tuning.
What they achieved:
The five AI models, called robot utility models, (RUMs), allow machines to complete five separate tasks: opening doors and drawers, and picking up tissues, bags and cylindrical objects in unfamiliar environments with a 90% success rate.
The big picture: The team hope their findings will make it quicker and easier to teach robots new skills while helping them function within previously-unseen domains. The approach could make it easier and cheaper to deploy robots in our homes in future. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
Flu season is coming—and so is the risk of an all-new bird flu
September will soon be drawing to a close. The kids are back to school, and those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are experiencing the joys the end of summer brings: the cooling temperatures, the falling leaves, and, inevitably, the start of flu season.
In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the flu vaccine for everyone over six months old. This year, following the spread of the “bird flu” H5N1 in cattle, the CDC is especially urging dairy farm workers to get vaccinated.
The goal is not only to protect those workers from seasonal flu, but to protect us all from a potentially more devastating consequence: the emergence of a new form of flu that could trigger another pandemic. That hasn’t happened yet, but unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly possible. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly health and biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Things aren’t looking good for the Doomsday Glacier It’s rapidly melting, and its collapse appears imminent. (CNN) + If that happened, it’d be a disaster for global sea levels. (Bloomberg $) + But we still have time to influence how rapidly the process unfolds. (New Scientist $) + Interventional measures have been in place for years. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Major social media firms harvested vast amounts of user data To the extent that it qualifies as mass surveillance. (NYT $) + The US FTC accused firms of failing to protect user privacy. (WP $)
3 Apple’s new Mac update is breaking cybersecurity systems The Sequoia update has messed up tools from CrowdStrike and others. (TechCrunch) + The company’s suite of AI tools is now available to test out in public betas. (The Verge)
4 Tech companies are pushing to weaken the EU AI Act It’s a last ditch attempt to lobby for lighter regulation before its codes of practice are finalized. (Reuters) + The AI Act is done. Here’s what will (and won’t) change. (MIT Technology Review)
5 To build better batteries, we need new anodes Cathodes get all the attention, but other components are equally important. (Economist $) + Three takeaways about the current state of batteries. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Most of us can’t afford to avoid microplastics Non-plastic alternatives are wildly expensive. So what can we do? (The Atlantic $) + Microplastics are everywhere. What does that mean for our immune systems? (MIT Technology Review)
7 Crypto thieves sold $243 million from a single person The creditor of a defunct trading firm fell for a sophisticated scam. (CoinDesk)
8 Blue light glasses aren’t as useful as they claim to be You’re better off taking regular screen breaks instead. (WP $)
9 This delivery robot knocked over a passing pedestrian The robot actually drove away, reversed and hit them for a second time. (404 Media) + The company has offered the victim vouchers in compensation. (The Verge)
10 iPhones are nudging their owners to check in with their exes No thanks! (Insider $)
Quote of the day
“Self-regulation has been a failure.”
—The Federal Trade Commission criticizes social media platforms and video streaming services’ surveillance of their users in a damning new report, the Verge reports.
The big story
Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present
October 2022
Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question “How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?”—and supplied methods for calculating the answer.
It’s no surprise that effective altruisms’ ideas have long faced criticism for reflecting white Western saviorism, alongside an avoidance of structural problems in favor of abstract math. And as believers pour even greater amounts of money into the movement’s increasingly sci-fi ideals, such charges are only intensifying. Read the full story.
—Rebecca Ackermann
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)+ Mmmm, doughnuts 🍩 + Gentlemen, step away from the chore jacket. + Once a spelling bee champion, always a spelling bee champion. But what do they do once they get older? + Why Hugh Grant is the perfect villain, actually.
And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.
Leaked files obtained by The Guardian reveal that the Israeli government took extraordinary measures to prevent information about the Pegasus spyware system from falling into the hands of US courts, including seizing files directly from the company to prevent legal disclosure. The spyware is the product of the Israel-based NSO Group. It allows users to infect smartphones, extract messages and photos, record calls, and secretly activate microphones. NSO Group faces legal action in the US brought by WhatsAppwhich claims the company engineered Pegasus to target users of its messaging software. According to WhatsApp, more than 1,400 of its users were targeted. NSO, whose software has been allegedly tied to the harassment and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has denied any wrongdoing.
In an effort to thwart BIOS-based threats, prompted in part by the rollout of a powerful rootkit designed by a Chinese researcher in 2007, Secure Boot became a widely adopted tool. Unfortunately, researchers at the security firm Binarly have revealed that Secure Boot is now “completely compromised” on more than 200 device models, affecting major hardware manufacturers like Dell, Acer, and Intel. The incident was the result of a weak cryptographic key used to establish trust between hardware and firmware systems. AMI, the key’s owner, says it was meant to be used for testing and should never have made its way into production.
Following in Meta’s footsteps, Elon Musk’s X quietly adjusted its settings this week to give the company’s AI system—known as Grok—access to all of its users’ posts. There is a way to prevent Grok from ingesting your posts; however, you cannot perform this action from the mobile app. You’ll need to access X’s Settings using a desktop computer; select Privacy and Safetythen select Grokand then uncheck the box. Or just head straight here to go directly to the right settings page. (You can also delete your conversation history with Grok, if you have one, by clicking Delete conversation history.)
Westfield, NJ (RestaurantNews.com) The Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers (CHART) is pleased to announce a new partnership with Unboxed Training & Technologya leader in award-winning learning experiences, custom training content, and AI-powered learning technology.
